Patrick Woodhead - The Cloud Maker (2010)

Why was it not working?

It was the sergeant who grabbed his shaking hands, holding them still for a moment as he brought a light to the cigarette. Chen inhaled deeply, once, twice, and then a third time in quick succession. Eventually he let out a long, ragged breath, sending a plume of smoke skywards.

‘Get the body. Beijing will want to see it,’ he managed. ‘And get those fucking people away from the house.’

The sergeant nodded curtly and then ran off towards the house, barking orders. Chen watched him go then silently moved around behind the two stationary jeeps, into the shade of one of the nearby houses. He inhaled on the cigarette again then leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and vomited.

Chapter 6

‘I don’t hear from you for three months. Then you turn up out of the blue with a rucksack full of dirty clothes and want me to dig up some old satellite maps . . . Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?’

Luca smiled, resting his hands on the arms of his leather chair. He still remembered the days when he used to be genuinely terrified of Jack Milton’s craggy face and withering gaze. As a boy he’d sat in this study, in this same sagging armchair, and felt the weight of the long silences that seemed to be part of every conversation he had with his uncle.

For the young Luca, Jack’s prematurely lined face and shaking hands had always been just another sign of his strange otherwordliness. He was a professor of geology at Cambridge University and somehow different from everyone else. Everything about him was unpredictable, often erratic and confused. It was only as an adult that Luca saw these idiosyncrasies for what they really were – the signs of an ex-alcoholic who had strayed too close to the edge before purging himself of his addiction. Now he drank endless cups of coffee, channelling his compulsive drive into the minutiae of the rocks he studied.

The study hadn’t changed in all those years and was still crammed with books. Wooden shelves honeycombed the walls right up to the ceiling, so that the uppermost volumes threatened to shower down amidst a cloud of dust. At shoulder height, some of the books were pushed aside to make room for selections of rock samples, stacked in small piles and having long since lost their identifying labels.

‘You’re the only person I know who really gives a shit,’ Luca said, dunking a biscuit into his coffee.

‘Well it’s good to know I’m top of a long list,’ Jack laughed, creasing the deep-set lines at the corners of his eyes. ‘So go on, tell me everything. Makalu must have been quite something.’

There was a pause. As his nephew remained silent, Jack stopped smiling.

‘Is something up?’

‘Everything’s fine. Except Bill got altitude sickness and we missed the summit by a couple of hours. We sort of fell out on the way back down and I’m not sure we’re on speaking terms right now.’

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Jack softly. ‘I know how much time you two put into it. But I’m sure you’ll sort out things with Bill. You’ve been friends far too long to fall out for long.’

‘Yeah, I suppose so.’

‘Come on, Luca. Nothing can have been said that can’t be taken back.’

Luca shrugged. ‘Is it all right if we don’t talk about this?’

Jack’s brow creased further as he took another gulp of coffee. ‘Sure. So are you going to tell me some more about this pyramid mountain?’

Luca smiled, his face lighting up.

‘I wish you had been there to see it, Jack. It was incredible. And set in the middle of a stunning ring of mountains. Have you ever heard mention of it?’

‘No,’ Jack said, standing up and walking over to his desk. ‘After you called, I dug everything we have on the area east of Makalu from the departmental library. Took me a while to find these and blow the dust off them. Not exactly the world’s most sought-after documents.’

He carried the maps over to the low table and knelt down. Fishing out his reading glasses from his breast pocket, he held the first map up to the light.

‘This one’s about six months old – the most recent.’

He pulled it a little closer and studied the grid references, drawing a finger over the contours of the Himalayas. He stopped suddenly and prodded. ‘There’s Makalu.’

Luca moved round the table so that they were shoulder to shoulder and peered more closely at the markings. The map showed a vast swathe of the Himalayas, with swirling currents of cloud bending round the massive peaks and valleys.

‘I’m guessing it would be forty kilometres or so east of that,’ said Luca. ‘Somewhere over here.’

Simultaneously their eyes swept over the map until they alighted on a small cluster of peaks, bent round in a perfect circle.

‘That’s them!’ Luca said, feeling a strange lift of excitement. Part of him hadn’t expected them to exist at all.

‘It’s strikingly symmetrical, I’ll admit,’ said Jack, adjusting his reading glasses and leaning forward to examine the formation more closely. ‘But you say the most interesting mountain was the one in the middle? All I can see is cloud.’

‘It was right in the centre, Jack. It sounds odd, I know, but it was like a kind of a pyramid, perfectly proportioned, as if someone had been up there with a chisel. I only caught a glimpse of it when I was high enough on Makalu.’

‘A pyramid-shaped mountain,’ repeated Jack, immersing himself in the twisted contours of the map. He had studied maps all his working life and was able to interpret the graphite markings as if staring down on each peak for real. ‘If it’s anywhere near the same height as the others in that range then that would make it nearly seven thousand metres high – which, as you know, would make the Matterhorn look like a molehill.’

Luca nodded. Between the ring of mountains, all he could see was a thick belt of cloud twisting in between the peaks. He leaned closer, searching for the slightest sign of the pyramid mountain. There was nothing.

‘Any other maps of the region?’

‘Sure,’ said his uncle. ‘We have nine or ten of these satellite images, going back a few years. One every six months or so.’

Together, they lifted the first map off the table and laid it on the floor. Luca quickly bent over the next one, his face furrowed in concentration. Jack glanced over at his nephew, feeling a flicker of concern to see that light in his eyes. It was no accident that whenever Luca worried him the most, it was when he reminded Jack of himself. It was not something he would ever put into words, but he was pretty sure his nephew had inherited the same dark, addictive streak.

‘Shit!’ said Luca as he traced his finger across the region. ‘Still cloud.’

They went through each of the maps in turn. Discarded, the massive sheaves of paper covered most of the study floor, their edges curled up like giant scrolls.

‘Always the same: cloud covering the entire region. How is this possible?’ Luca said eventually, staring directly at Jack. ‘There’s not a single break in any of these images.’

Seeing his frustration, Jack sighed. Wincing slightly as his knees cracked, he began gathering the maps off the floor.

‘You have to understand that some mountains create their own weather systems. They reach so high into the atmosphere that they actually change the weather around them. In this particular case, they create a lot of cloud.’

Luca had heard the theory before. The great summits of the Himalayas could cause moisture in the atmosphere to condense around them and collect along their massive flanks. The invariable result: cloud.

‘But why can’t the satellite penetrate the cloud? Can’t you switch to infra-red or something and see through all that kind of stuff?’